


Of Recoil and Grace

by Ruhenheim



Category: Monster (Anime & Manga)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-25 21:06:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18171479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruhenheim/pseuds/Ruhenheim
Summary: Tenma hoped his MSF assignment would give him closure, or at least distance.





	Of Recoil and Grace

The jeep plodded over the rough dirt driveway, stopping with a jerk. Tenma spat the dust out of his mouth and waited for Joseph, the driver, to kill the ignition.

"Well," the other man said with a grin, "this is it." He glanced around the courtyard, swarmed with people and garish colors and the smell of sweat and ethanol as though inviting Tenma to gage the sincerity of his smile. Tenma nodded; his heart was palpitating, even though he had nothing but the change of pace and scenery to be nervous about, and he wanted to savor the rush in silence.

Joseph slammed the car door shut and carefully stretched his arms and back. "Let me take you to the office," he said, but he made no attempt to move. The light wind refreshed him, and he did not look forward to going inside. Tenma got out of the jeep slowly, feeling stiff from the ride and weak with hunger, and hoisted his duffel bag onto his shoulder. Joseph noticed the growing wet stains at his armpits, small beads of sweat dotting his forearms up to his rolled-up cuffs, the soaked patch at the small of his back. That's not how you dress for Africa, he thought to himself.

Tenma gazed at the compound. They had parked on the south side, away from the tents – but though the area was bare, it was filled with people. They clustered in small groups; from each came a scent of cigarette smoke and a ring of voices, speaking in Somali and Arabic and accented English. As he strained to understand the bits of conversation, a faint, repetitive sound of the click of a camera reached his ears. There was a girl in a tank top and a kafiya – European, as far as he could tell with her back to him – taking pictures of the villagers.

"You ready?" Joseph asked him. "It's this way."

*

Tenma followed him into the stocky whitewashed building, through the narrow, unevenly floored hallway. In the blur of the motion, his heart sped up again. Joseph announced him to the secretary, and the secretary led him into the mission head's office. He rubbed his palms against his thighs to wipe away the sweat.

The head stood up as he entered. She was a tall woman – as tall as he – and she offered him a firm hand despite her wretchedly tired look.

"Call me Barbara. It's so great to finally meet you," she smiled, sitting down. Her English had the lilt of a foreigner and the confidence of a native speaker. Her accent and graying pale hair suggested Scandinavian roots. Tenma took a seat on the thinly cushioned metal chair and smiled back. "Thank you. It's great to meet you too."

Barbara regarded his face with earnest warmth. She had had no idea who he was until he contacted the MSF, but the word had quickly spread from there on that the mystical surgeon newly freed from criminal charges might be coming to the Somalian mission on an assignment. They had spoken over the phone several times – for logistical purposes as much as to ease certain apprehensions about working with someone who had been tried for a long string of murders – but seeing him in person inspired in her a strangely unabashed trust in his character.

They did not talk for long – he was obviously worn out from the flight, and she didn't have time for niceties. He was to report to work the following noon, and familiarize himself with the compound in the meantime.

"Thanks again, Dr. Tenma," she said as he rose to leave. The metal chair creaked. She was sure that he was not used to the meager conditions of the mission and hoped, for his sake, that he would not take long adjusting.

*

The girl with the camera had lowered the lens. Her eyes caught his, and he found himself blushing faintly.

She was older than he first supposed – in her mid-to-late-twenties, probably – and certainly far more beautiful than he would have imagined. Her gaze was direct; her lips pursed in a way that gave her expression a mocking quality. Feeling stupid for getting flustered, Tenma purposefully looked away and focused on his food.

She walked over to his table, and did not wait to be told to sit down.

"My name is Summer."

*

They ate lunch together, for the fourth time that week. It could have been the children's laughter behind them, or the brightness of her dress, or the slight fermentation of the apple juice from the carton box, but he found himself at ease, opening up, answering the unspoken questions about his past that lingered in the air.

"It felt... It felt like I was constantly walking on a tightrope."

He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth – she seemed like someone who would sneer at trite analogies; yet she listened with sincere interest and without judgment, and she lifted her fingers off the cracked wooden table and flexed them as if itching to grab his hand and squeeze it in comfort. Or maybe he was imagining all of that; maybe her sympathy was his own little African mirage.

"I can take stress," he said after a silence, "I can deal with good amounts of it. But if I see no solution ahead of me, no moment of rest at all, it makes it that much harder. Yeah," he concluded awkwardly, "it was hell."

She nodded slowly. "And you figured this would be the best place to unwind?"

"Not to unwind..." he trailed off. He felt like the thought of his guilt constantly hung in his words, on his breath, in the oppressive hot quiet of the air. He was sick of mentioning it, sick of reflecting on it. Atonement sounded so upright, so heroic, so unlike what he had felt when he decided that the only way he could numb that persistent sense of culpability was through an extreme renunciation of safety and comfort. He hadn't meant to be reckless, just useful.

"What about you? Some kind of journalist assignment?"

She stifled a laugh. "I'm planning to give an exhibit once I get back to London. Your typical rich white kid raise-the-awareness type of thing. So I can later feel better about my two cars and indoor pools and the luxury to leave any time I want. But you could say it's mostly just running. Away."

It did not escape him that she'd referred to herself as a kid, when she was at the same age at which he had already had to make life-and-death decisions. Her luxury was not that of money, but of moral irresponsibility, and though he guessed that this was precisely the thing she was trying to elude in her life by coming to the middle of nowhere on a strange continent, a vague sense of resentment gnawed at him nonetheless. Still, he told himself, he knew nothing of her situation. He had no right to judge.

"Away from what?" he asked her finally, cutting awkwardly through the silence.

"I don't really know." She bent the straw with her finger, unbent it, bent it once more. The sun caught the wide band of her silver ring, then disappeared in the shadow of the juice box. His eyes stung from the afterimage. "I don't even know anymore."

Tenma looked uncomfortable. His break was ending in five minutes, but her vulnerable confidence made parting impossible.

"I have to get back at two-thirty. Do you want to walk with me?"

She glanced at her watch and shrugged. "I don't want to slow you down. I'll see you later."

He nodded. She sounded so casual and so committed at once. As he walked away, he wondered what it could have meant.

*

As he passed the nurses' table with his empty tray, he heard the conversation drop to a murmur. Post-traumatic, he heard from the whispering lips, shielded by hands pretending to swat flies away. I mean, who wouldn't feel like shit after that?

It was said so simply, so matter-of-factly. But to diagnose was to chance at a solution, and he saw no escape, bad or good, from the thoughts that so consistently harrowed him. If it was indeed mere stress following stress, he could count on time to mechanically alleviate the depression that had settled over him. When he had cried enough, raged enough, shed enough sweat and blood, the clockwork of his brain would align itself with the alchemy of time, and he would feel like his regular old self again – haunted occasionally by the unfairness of the world, but overall ready to let his good work unburden his conscience. But this was different – he felt that his entire being had been uprooted, his beliefs unmasked, stripped bare to be examined and re-examined until they were found deficient, flawed, hypocritical.

*

At night, when nightmares succeeded one another, she was in all of them.

First, dream-logic had made her a journalist, an undercover reporter who came to track him down and learn the story he had refused to give – the story of the twins and all the horrors that enveloped them, the horrors that he would never betray or sensationalize. One by one, all the secrets spilled from his lips as he stupidly bought into her stilted explanation about a project for the National Geographic.

Then the dream changed, and he realized that the undercover persona was also a lie: she was really working for Johann, his lover and his spy. She held the small girl whose leg he had operated on that day at gunpoint and asked him to shoot with a horrifying, hysterical laugh.

He woke up in a cold sweat – or at least he thought he did – and she was there, on his bed, one of her slim white legs thrown over his stomach. "Make love to me," she whispered in his ear, making his cheeks burn with shame and lust. With his hand, he traced the firm flesh of her body, the warm smoothness of her skin, the wetness between her legs.

His eyes snapped open in the darkness. He was suddenly alert – and yet unaware of what had been a dream and what reality, half expecting to feel her weight on his body or hear her quickly receding footsteps. Was it the loneliness of Africa? He tried to tell himself that it was only because she was a young, beautiful, reputedly promiscuous woman who would sleep with him without burdening herself with expectations, then wondered why he felt this to be true with such certainty when they knew next to nothing about each other.

She, for her part, lay on her back in a small tent on the outskirts of the compound and dug her fingers into the taut brown flesh of the beautiful twenty-year-old and for the first time wished that the body looming over her were older, weaker, more slack and slender, more imperfect, but gentle and precise and able to drive her to the utmost summit of sensation with his surgeon's fingers. The boy in her arms grunted and thrust faster and faster until she could feel nothing at all anymore, and as soon as he was finished, she absentmindedly said to him that she would be busy the following night. He smiled a lopsided grin, unaware of or unconcerned with her growing apathy, and lowered himself onto her again, kissing her collarbone. He was growing hard again, sucking on her breast to buy himself time; shutting her eyes, she wondered in the hazy pleasure of the boy's tongue on her nipple if the doctor would ever show similar forwardness. Probably not, she thought. He seemed passive – as though he merely reacted, and never acted.

*

He wondered if they had assigned him to a low-risk mission because of his publicity, or because they deemed him a sort of liability because of his past. The area was not war-torn, only poor, the compound large and well-organized, and there was little actual surgery to be performed. Ten years ago, he would have been indignant at his skills being squandered, but right now he could only feel a timid, half-embarrassed gratitude that he could finally find some rest.

*

In the dusk, they stood by the fence, side by side. Summer was drinking cheap beer out of a bottle wrapped in a yellow plastic bag. Tenma had taken one sip and decided to stick with water.

"Ah, you epicure, you," she teased. "It's really quite tolerable once you get used to it."

"I'll take your word for it."

She turned around, leaned on the railing with her back.

"When was the last time you were in Japan?"

He blew up his cheeks and let the air out slowly. "A while. God, almost twenty years."

"You don't miss it?"

"I'm not much of a nation person. More of a 'people are people wherever they are' person."

"What about a women person?"

Tenma shrugged. It could have been an awkward question, but the constant, not entirely unpleasant tension between them made him appreciate her directness.

"It just seems like I never have time for women."

Summer took his hand in hers. "You have time now."

*

They had finished the beer together, in the shadow of her tent.

Summer had taken off his shirt, playfully, admiring. He realized, as he leaned over her, that it had been a long time – but she made everything seem so simple, so normal and familiar.

With her hands holding his cheeks, she kissed him. It was a strange kiss – it brought back distant memories, it conflated the present with the future, it melted away his concerns and just as instantly amplified them with a burst of pain. It was strange feeling so many emotions kissing someone you did not love, kissing someone you barely even knew. It occurred to him that she was incidental to him – just as he was incidental to her.

*

She was glad that he did not ask "why me" like other men, glad that he assumed no false modesty to disguise an eagerness for praise – as though her body had been a prize to be given for upright behavior or particular cleverness, as though she had no lust of her own. If he had asked, she would have said, "it is because your eyes hold an enveloping sadness, and because there is an absence of something that I cannot quite put my finger on." But he did not ask. She had wanted him, and even if he did not know exactly what it was about him that she liked, he had a vague idea of his appeal. The perpetually haunted look hiding in the corners of his eyes, lurking behind every smile, awakened sympathy in people. They sensed he needed to be healed, rehabilitated, and every one of them seemed to him to think that she could be the one fix him, undo the damage, restore his faith in life.

He had no idea why he felt worse now than he did before, on the run. The danger was gone. But now that he had the time to reflect on everything that had happened from every angle, his uncertainty redoubled, retripled, multiplied itself into something omnipresent and oppressive and unforgiving. Was he stupid enough to think that running away to some idealized hail of bullets in the parching sun would really stifle the feeling of guilt? Could lost lives be reimbursed by his sacrifice of comfort and company and privacy? Behind his decision to join the MSF, how much of his reasoning had been inspired by an honest wish to help the disenfranchised and the ignored, and how much of it was a craving for an altruistic high, for a numbing of his self-loathing?

"I am so selfish," he whispered in German, almost inaudibly. Summer either did not hear or did not care. She caressed his broad, lotion-soft hand with her rough, chapped one, and smiled wistfully at her helplessness in banishing that strange hollowness from his eyes.

*

He was not twenty, and did not have the refractory period of an adolescent laborer. But she had enjoyed kissing his neck and playing with his hair and feeling his naked body with her own under the thin cotton sheet they had thrown over themselves to soak up the sweat until she felt him harden against her stomach. She moved to straddle him, but he moved too, and rolled her down onto the mattress, pushing her legs apart. His fingers entered her first, and it was just as she had expected – strong, long, meticulous fingers capable of making the minutest incision, exploring her body with the subtlety and precision that made her back arch with greed. His grip on her neck was firmer than before, the pull on her hair a little more feral, as if he could not abandon his sorrow without relinquishing all self-possession. He remembered the condom at the last second and tore the wrapper with his teeth, rolling it on with a frenetic kind of care. She moaned a soft, contented groan of dissipating inhibition and locked her legs around his fever-hot back.

Regaining control of himself, he slowed down, moving in deep, measured thrusts that drove her back painfully into the hard ground the futon could not temper by much. "Wait," she whispered. His fingertips pressed into her hips and let go just as suddenly, and he retracted to allow her to change position. Seeing her back as she lay down on her stomach made her seem strangely compliant, made him seem more like an aggressor and less like a lover. He veered between gentleness and violence, kissing her neck, then grasping her hair, caressing her lips, then pushing his fingers past them into her mouth. When her breathing escalated into uncontrollable moans, he pulled her into a frenzied kiss that lasted until he lost all restraint, brought her around onto her back, and lay down by her side after that deepest final thrust.

She lay silenced and overawed by the aggression he had betrayed, not so much discontented as pensive. He suddenly felt like a stranger. She had let him into her tent with ideas of fun and levity, but his love-making was intense and draining. The air between them acquired a wet chill.

His fingers uncurled towards her lips and she kissed them mechanically, not wishing to perpetuate the awkwardness. Something – a sort of confusion? – in his expression pacified her, made the anxiousness subside. She stretched her arm out and took his hand in hers.

*

The letter from Nina was a mix of awkward formality and equally awkward warmth. She told him that she began tutoring a neighbor's granddaughter in writing and reading, that one of her assignments had been a fairy tale from the Grimms' collection. She told him of her initial apprehensions; beneath her light jokes, he could feel a strain of anger and helplessness at something so minor and commonplace being able to so acutely prod at the scabs of her trauma. Simply because there were a brother and a sister in the tale, simply because the brother had been changed into something nonhuman.

She thanked him. She said she didn't know how to thank him. She said that even if she thanked him a thousand times, it would never be enough. She was starting to feel more normal and less guilty, and her life was beginning to acquire a routine and predictability in whose dullness she rejoiced. He read her words over and over again, feeling as though he were on the verge of self-realization, until he sensed that he had grasped the fundamental difference between Nina's experience and his own: because he was more of a spectator, because he had been given a choice to act instead of being helplessly thrust into that horror of Bonaparta's creation, he had launched himself into his quest for Johann with a dimension of thrill that she could have never felt. It was accidental; it wasn't his motive at all – he chased after Johann because it was the right thing to do, not because it kept his adrenaline pumping – but it enabled him to bear his load with less grief and bitterness. Because he had felt a certain excitement – not much by any means, but it was there with him, in the dusty back of a truck, in the cold weight of his gun, in the blood trickling down his lip as he tried to fight the crushing pain of Roberto's blows while summoning the strength to stop him from killing – he could perceive in his situation the fulfillment of a slightly masochistic, slightly arrogant desire to see how far he could be pushed before he finally broke.

He read the end of the letter again, with its bland, insincere well-wishes written in the spirit of generic propriety followed by a sudden burst of emotion at the close. I miss you. You have, in many ways, been my safety net, and now, in your absence, I am truly alone and truly forced to stand on my own two feet. It is the type of strength I dread having, and I am generally sick and tired of being strong. I am mostly optimistic, but every once in a while my optimism wears thin, and I realize how badly I need a crutch in my life in the form of another human being. I don't mean to end on such a depressing note, but all this contemplation of the past has made me pensive. I'm okay, really. I'm sorry I've made this letter so long... I imagine you're on a tight schedule, and have more important things to do than listen to my ramblings.

Tenma lowered the page and gazed at the floor. More important things like reminding the villagers to use condoms as an alternative to abortion, or fucking an indolent princess with her rich-girl demons and ineffective guilt. Mere months ago, he would have never touched a woman simply because she was beautiful and available, but her hollowness and self-destructive lethargy reflected his own so well that his indifference to her as an individual ceased to matter. His old disgust with humanity came back to him in a flash, but now it was directed at him himself. The people he treated here were barely more than skin and bones, while he was reasonably well fed. They were illiterate in their own language, while he knew three. Their opportunities were limited by the borders of their villages, and he could hop from country to country, continent to continent, at whim. Restlessly, helplessly, he rubbed his eyes and thought of his old hospital, of how grateful his patients had been to return to their daily lives. The people here lived in backbreaking toil and horrifying poverty, and he could not imagine what joy and warmth they could salvage out of their harsh existence, to what joy and warmth they could hope to return.

*

"This is such a different world from Europe," Summer said over her sandwich. "It's all the same Earth, and yet, the norms are completely different. And yet... isn't it their misery that allows our affluence?"

"I'm sure globalization did not invent prosperity." Tenma said. He made an attempt to sound ironic instead of contrary, but he was getting progressively irritated with every word that was spoken. He stood up. "Sorry. I'm not feeling well."

He had walked away without looking at her, without seeing whether she was hurt or offended by his rudeness, or if her customary apathy had precluded any reaction at all. He hated the side of himself that allowed him to walk away, that decided that other people's feelings didn't matter when his own were in turmoil. But the weight was becoming unbearable – the weight of his memories, the weight of everything, really, the weight of Johann bloodied head between his fingers, mocking the futility of everything that Tenma believed in.

Johann. Johann. Johann. Johann. Johann. Johann. It always returned to Johann. But it hadn't really been Johann. Johann was an agent, an allegory, a mere impetus, the finger that pushed the first domino. Johann had been there to put everything that he knew or suspected about life in palpable terms, but life was bigger than Johann, and so was his own feeble understanding of it. He stared at his reflection in the mirror, like the God of Peace, but instead of seeing a demon, he saw something worse – he saw a human, an uncertain, fallible, contradictory, helpless human, who was forever forced to make decisions without knowing what lay behind or after them. You see it, don't you? Yes, I see it, I've never seen it more fucking clearly than I do now. The landscape of absolutely nothing. The only thing there is to embrace as a constant is the utter nothingness of everything.

There was no sense in blaming Johann, then, when the problem was rooted deep within him, deep within the world, outside of Johann's agency. What was Johann, anyway? A maddened child whose sense of identity had been shaken badly enough to spur him on a murderous rampage. But who was he? Tenma Kenzo, Kenzo Tenma, a man who had no ties to any place, any time, any human being, like a shadow of an errant knight leaving behind a trace of vague, confused love. He valued life so much to always save it, and so little as to never really live it. He saved others so they could go on buying their overpriced shoes and watching their soap operas and arguing about politics which they could never influence and spending time with friends whose personalities and habits they will unfailingly vilify behind their backs. Johann was a product of this world, too, and he had decided to act against its emptiness. Because he disdained it, he could punish it, exploit it, destroy it.

Why did all of these feelings have to come crashing at him now? He wondered if he, like Nina, needed a safety net, a security which he had had before but that was now gone with his removal from everything that he had previously known. Something had kept him going before, but there was nothing to keep him going now. The immediate danger was gone. This whimsical MSF thing, this bullshit, it was just a failed attempt to recreate the disruption of normalcy that had spurred him on before. Life had fallen back into its regular pattern, and nothing in that pattern held even a promise of happiness for him. He had no true friends, no confidante, no wife or child or even a fucking dog.

It was really true that happiness is found with others. He understood Johann better and better now – the boy had no one except for the sister who feared and reviled him. Of course he was insane. Of course he could see nothing in the world save for unbounded loneliness and pain. For all his charisma and intelligence and beauty and success with apparently everything he tried his luck at, he was just another miserable human spectator who had been exposed to the intense pain of being without any means to assuage it. When he had decided to take matters into his own hands and retaliate against the world in the only way he had ever known – the way of death and agony – was he not acting on the very same impulse that Tenma himself had felt?

It had not been an accident that Johann had picked him out for the final stroke of his perfect suicide, Tenma knew. But, whereas before he believed that Johann's actions were performed for the sake of a mocking, cruel mind game, a passionless attempt to gage his own ability to corrupt, he now began to consider that it was an understanding of their sameness, of the solidarity of their equal loneliness, that drove Johann to try to prove him wrong – as though he was not striving to break him, after all, but to open his eyes to how broken the world was already. It was... almost loving. Johann's repayment: reality in exchange for life.

Tenma squeezed his temples, hard, digging into the bone. He felt like he was losing his mind. Johann did not represent reality. Johann was the farthest thing from reality, his own reality. Their beliefs were entirely antipodal... weren't they? Tenma could not tell anymore; could not tell if Johann was absolutely deranged or if the boy's logic eluded him solely because he actively shunned it. He was afraid of it – he was afraid of what it would say about him if he could grasp a madman's point of view. He needed to stop thinking about this. He needed alcohol, or sleeping pills, or maybe a bullet in his head. No, not a bullet in the head, but see, he grimaced to himself with bitter humor, Johann is effective even in a coma, even long-distance. Mechanically, he stood up and headed for Summer's tent as the only sanctuary against Johann's influence he had. With a rush of blood to his chest, he thought for a moment – before immediately censoring, stifling, discarding the image – about whom he really would have liked to see in that tent, whose body he really wanted to press against and envelop as he ran from the horror of Johann's omnipresence. The boy was inescapable. In bed, in the shower, in the middle of breakfast, in the middle of an orgasm, he would haunt him and taunt him until the world really was nothing but the empty madness of the end.

*

Summer was reading a book by a hurricane lamp. She looked up at him with her habitual reserved smile, neither visibly surprised or annoyed; when she saw him hesitate at the entrance to the tent, she tapped the futon encouragingly.

"You're too patient with me," he said as he sat down, offering her a sheepish smile. "I've been a dick."

"You've been going through a very persistent hell. I think I'm justified in cutting you slack."

"Thank you."

She took his hand. "Don't get all formal with me."

"I mean it. I feel... I just feel that even though everything is over now, I have barely started to come to terms with any of it. There is so much that I am uncertain about – my decisions, my convictions... I've had to act according to these convictions, but what if they are wrong at their core?"

"You expect to have God's knowledge."

He bowed his head. "People are strange."

"Not really. They're awful, and lovely, and everything in between. But you, you're at the extremity, and that's why it appears strange to you."

His breath seemed to catch in his throat. "Don't say that."

"Don't say what?"

"Don't make me look better than I am. All my life, I've been told that. Rare. Prodigious. Brilliant. Great. Whatever I did, everywhere I went, I kept being perceived as this idealized illusion because I was luckier, more talented, more focused, and marginally smarter than others, and all it's produced this ridiculous notion in people that I'm a better person for it. None of the qualities I'm admired for are a product of my own work."

"I heard somewhere – I don't remember where – that we can relate to those smarter than us more easily than we do to people stupider than ourselves. I think that's true. And I think it's true because your intelligence brings you closer to an ideal that most people can conceive of. And I think that you, being very close to that ideal, despite your protests to the contrary, have no conception of how the rest of the world thinks and operates, because their logic makes no sense to you."

"I don't know if I buy that."

"All the same. Not many people would have had the balls or the fortitude to do what you did."

Tenma smiled hollowly. "Balls and fortitude, huh."

*

He felt an urge to talk. An old urge, an old desire to hear another human's voice respond to his own and remind him that he was not alone in the world. Other people had always gravitated to one another so effortlessly. Sometimes he felt envy in being unable to relate to anyone with such ease and instinct – but mostly he felt insuperable loneliness. Why this rich English girl, of all people, managed to capture a ghost of his interest and palliate the intensity of his memories, he wasn't sure.

He liked her youthfulness and her nonchalance. Her style. Her thumb rings and her thin cotton T-shirts and her amalgam of the Western and the regional. But what beyond her style? He enjoyed her wit, he supposed. She was as sardonic as Eva, but it was an easy, self-deprecating sarcasm that rolled off her tongue lazily, with a smile. They had nothing in common – she was too young, too flighty, too independently rooted in her own life to attract him in any profound way; yet her unshakable self-awareness gave them a kind of equal footing, and he felt that, at least, here was someone he could confide in, lean on, sleep with, trust – without the burden of the future.

He let his fingers slide under the hem of her blouse. He scratched her skin gently, like a child scratching a cat.

She smiled devilishly. "Lower."

He obeyed – slowly, leisurely.

"Were you born in the summer?"

"No. My parents thought it was transgressive and terribly clever of them to name me that when I actually wasn't."

"Winter?"

"Spring."

He kissed her midriff.

"Lower," she tried again, whispering. Her skin prickled beneath his lips; they'd part, and so sensuously, so softly, press into her belly. He slid the elastic of her linen pants over her hips, and followed the downward trail with his mouth.

When the intensity built up to an unbearable height, she pushed his head away. He rose, knelt over her. As she unbuckled his belt, he reached for the condom sitting on the far side of the futon.

"No," she breathed. "Don't."

He looked at the purple package dubiously, his fingers still hovering over it. Summer frowned.

"I got tested before I came here. And I've only ever used condoms since I came."

His hand did not move. He would not have admitted it, but at that moment, the thought of AIDS terrified him.

"I just wanted... Intimacy." Her voice faltered.

His fingers relaxed. Closed. They both sat up – slowly, awkwardly. The spell was broken, the desire quickly fading.

"Intimacy," he whispered to himself. It was like a solution to a math problem, an elusive answer that had, for so long, been just beyond his reach. It was intimacy that saved a human being, kept him from becoming a monster. He'd had intimacy before – an intimacy of habit with Eva, an intimacy of having loved the same woman with Martin, an intimacy of the edge of death with Roberto, an intimacy of two adversaries with Runge, an intimacy of utter vulnerability with Nina. Even with Summer, there was a faint intimacy of carelessness, brokenness, a parallel sense of being lost. But his truest kinship, his realest connection, was tied to Johann – a boy with a bullet in his head – a young man with a gun in his hand – schizophrenic writing on the wall – a devil crying in the ruins of a mansion – a finger pointing at a pale forehead – a plea for death – blood in golden hair. Johann had been his catalyst, the evil that had unwittingly borne good. He was crazy, he was illogical, but he had shaped the most important events of Tenma's life. And his loneliness, his unbearable loneliness, Tenma could feel it, too. There was no intimacy as strong as that of equivalence – of the recognition that there was someone who felt as you did, for the same reason and with the same magnitude. He and Johann were the same in their isolation – exactly the same.

...And everything seemed to fall into place. It was not the chase that he missed, or the threat of death. It wasn't the feeling of altruism, the role of the protector. It was simply Johann, the person underneath the mastermind, inside the monster. Their link of alienation, of that cursed ability to perceive through the clamor and color of the world a vast and total emptiness, joined them in an intimacy that Tenma could never find replicated in anyone else.

*

Summer had lain down, her arms crossed over her chest. Tenma could not be certain, but he thought that her veneer of apathy was finally beginning to break. She smiled when she saw him looking at her, but it was a tight, barely tolerant smile.

"I didn't mean to offend you."

"It's my own fault."

"No," he said. "I'm just the wrong person for this. I have too many issues of my own."

"I know that. And I don't mind. I just wish you'd trusted me."

"I do trust you. I believe you. But accidents happen."

She sighed. "Yes... There's no reason for you to suffer for my mistakes. I guess it's stupid of me to equate intimacy with a piece of rubber in the first place."

Tenma took her hand in his. Kissed it. "I don't think I was built for intimacy."

She ran a fingertip over his lower lip. "I thought so. But neither am I. And in that inability to feel close to anybody, I find that I feel close to you. It binds us, somehow, this mutual inability to relate to others. At least... I'd like to think so."

Tenma smiled. What was kinship, if not having your thoughts mirrored?

He kissed her, deeply, slowly, losing himself in the softness of her mouth. Her body aligned with his. Their limbs twined and untwined, torsos locked together and sweaty. She passed the condom to him; he put it on with a pang of guilt. She saw his grimace and caressed his cheek with a smile.

*

Later, when Summer lay asleep in his arms, he thought about his life, his fortune, his problems. They all seemed so ephemeral – deathly stifling one moment, irrelevant the next. He could push through this. He would push through this. The key was never to forget. He would visit Nina in Heidelberg, and Grimmer's grave, and have a beer with that obstinate man Runge. He'd offer his thanks to Reichwein once more and reminisce of university days with Gillen. He'd watch Deiter's soccer games in the park. He'd pass by his old hospital – quietly, incognito, doing his best to avoid Dr. Becker. He'd write back to his brother, the brother that had been behind him without ever giving in to suspicion. Eva... Eva probably wouldn't want to see him. And then, after his demons were pacified, a bit of each scattered across Germany in the homes and hearts of his friends, he could summon the courage and find the one person that he could no longer elude.

The twin boy with pale hair, motionless on the hospital bed. The twin boy, Brüderchen, lying like the Sleeping Beauty, waiting.

*

Nina said to him once, He loves you because you are the only one who hasn't betrayed him.

He wondered if Johann loved him because he saw himself in him. Because loving himself in Tenma was the only way he could love himself. I am you and you are me. She had not been able to share his burden, she had not been able to forgive him; and so the shard of Johann embedded into her being slipped away, and lodged itself into the one person who defied everything to choose him.

*

He had over five months left on the assignment, but a loose itinerary began forming in his head. Munich, Düsseldorf, Munich again. Reichwein, Gillen, Dieter, Nina. Johann. Tiredly, content with his plan, he closed his eyes.

In his mind, a small blonde child – girl-Johann or Anna-Nina, or maybe both, rolled into one – clutched her story-book from hell and widened her blue eyes. "Welcome home."

Tenma whispered to himself, to the pale, almost sun-white image in his head. "Thank you."


End file.
